Last month you would have been 90 – a good age for anyone. But for the second world war, you would have had a good chance of making it in the prosperous Germany you never lived to see. Instead you died at 19, somewhere in Ukraine, as the Wehrmacht poured into Russia. Only weeks earlier, you had set off with joy in your heart to fight for the Führer.

My mother, your sister, never knew how you died. One of her old school friends told us recently that your death devastated her, that a dark veil came down that day, that never really lifted again.

For 60 years I have borne your name. In 1950, your sister commemorated you by giving her eldest son your name: William Rudolph. When the war ended she fled west, like millions of other Germans. A few years later, she abandoned Germany altogether. She lived the last 60 years of her life in Britain and for more than 40 years never saw her childhood home.

Growing up in the 1950s in the UK, I learned early on to keep quiet about my German ancestry. As a child, being called William Rudolf brought titters round the classroom or choruses of the Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. To me you were just the blond boy in the photograph on display at home.

It was only when my mother died last year that I found the other photograph of you, wearing the unmistakable helmet of a Nazi soldier. It could only have been taken weeks before you died, and it serves as an uncomfortable reminder that yours was a household committed to the Führer.

My grandmother was an ardent supporter of the Nazi party, an enthusiasm you seemed to have shared. She was proud of her son, the soldier. After your death she insisted that the word "Kriegsfreiwilliger" was carved on the gravestone erected to commemorate you. Literally, that means that you went to war as a committed volunteer.

Had you survived, I wonder how you would have coped with the discovery of the evils that the Nazis had perpetrated? Would you have confronted your past? Would you simply have clammed up?

I am not sure I would have liked you. Had you survived, we would certainly have met when I worked in Germany in the 60s. I was a long-haired student with leftish views, and I imagine we would have found little in common. Your dying meant that such uncomfortable meetings were avoided.

Only decades later did I acknowledge that, having now borne your name for many more years than you did, I should try to understand a little more about you. It was the least I could do for the uncle I never knew, the 19-year-old youth dying painfully on the eastern front.